Elebits - hands-on

Save the day by making a huge mess

We all know how annoying it is to lose something in your own home. During the ensuing room-to-room search, sofas are shuffled, television stands tipped over and don't even get us started on old jeans pockets. Can you imagine what it would be like if instead of car keys you lost a million cuddly personifications of electricity and all the appliances in your house went down? That's super bogus. Luckily, the Wii remote in Elebits functions as a beam-shooting capture gun, capable of lifting even the heaviest of objects as you tear the neighborhood apart looking for the tiny battery beasts.

With that impossible premise to go on, Elebits still looks like it could be a mess of fun. We spent a good deal of time with the first-person fetch-quest and came away impressed. Each level begins in total darkness - the Elebits are all hiding and as such are generating zero power. You use the Nunchuk to walk, hop and crouch, but it's the remote's capture beam that gets all the attention.

At first, your puny gun can only pick up small things like trash cans or books, but the more Elebits you find (tucked in drawers, underneath shoes... anywhere, really), the more the gun juices up. After a certain wattage is met, an appliance somewhere in the level will power up, ready to spew its hidden Elebits out into wild. Now that the little guys are on the run, you zap 'em up with your gun and continue on until time runs out.